Ambionics Crowd Fund 2018

Dear friends

The past 6 months have been amazing for Ambionics. We have appeared in a featured CNN article, we’ve won multiple global awards and have even become finalists in the Inventor Prize. We’re also making huge leaps in the development of our business model and our pre-production prototypes too. Recently we even had our research proposals scrutinised and approved by experts in the field. So from the outside it may seem as though we have already made it but in reality we are not quite there… yet!

In truth if it had not been for the colossal amount of public support that we’ve received over the past year, Ambionics would not be here today. You are the reason we have come so far!

In addition to the £5,000 we received from NESTA on the Inventor Prize we also raised £19,400 on our first Crowd fund and £14,800 in donations through our website including a £3,200 contribution from Dragon Karate Cymru and £700 from Babinogion Menai. The rest of the money has come from family and friends and smaller events organised by local businesses

Sadly we are not eligible for funding through the various Welsh Government Schemes that we have explored with our contacts there. This is because Ambionics is not yet an SME (Small to Medium Enterprise employing more than five people) – we are technically a Micro Company employing just one person.

Melissa is working purely in a voluntary capacity for now but we would obviously like that to be a full time paid role working along side me at M-SParc. We also need to hire a technician and a part time admin assistant urgently but simply don’t have the funding to cover it.

Our plan is to get investment from the Development Bank of Wales who will then own part of Ambionics. Because the Development Bank is a government organisation the funding we are looking for (an initial amount of £200,000) must be matched in part (70:30). This means we still need to find just over £12,000 in order to be able to recruit a team. This brings me to the point.

Following a peer review by experts, we can now launch a new crowd funding campaign on the Orthopaedic Research UK / FutSci platform they have created together.

As with any crowd fund successful campaigns are those which secure 30% of the target on launch day. This was one of the reasons our campaign on Indiegogo failed – despite being on TV and in the media around the world, we only achieved 20% of the target AFTER two months of campaigning. The psychology here is that people will back a campaign that looks like it will succeed.

From today, all donations made through our PayPal facility and any proceeds from our online shop (more on that later!) will be saved up and used on launch day to get us over this critical 30% point.

We need to find £4,800 in just 60 days to do that. This is not going to be easy so once again (and hopefully for the last time!) we are calling on our fans and followers to get involved and help us to smash this crowd fund out of the park!